Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday July 08, 2011 @11:29AM
from the beginning-of-the-end dept.

Space Shuttle Atlantis has just launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. STS-135 marks the final flight for the shuttle program, 30 years after Columbia touched the sky during STS-1. The mission summary (PDF) outlines STS-135's crew and event timeline. NASA's launch blog has been following the countdown all morning, and our own CmdrTaco has been tweeting live from on-site. NASA TV is also being streamed live. Meteorological reports for the launch looked doubtful at first, but a gap in the bad weather at just the right time allowed everything to proceed as planned. Atlantis successfully reached its preliminary orbit in what a NASA official called a "flawless" launch.

Too bad Congress managed to cut the funding on any replacement programs once they showed even the smallest glimmer of potentially being finished.

"Moneys being spent on outer space?!?! This space vehicle doesn't have any pork for my congressional district! We have sovereign nations to invade using the excuse of the month and it takes more money than we have to do it! This has to go!"

I hope the Russians can keep the ISS up on their own. As soon as Atlantis pulls away from it to return to Earth, the betting pool opens.

You now, If somebody at NASA had some big balls this could work to it's advantage.

Congresscritter: "We're shutting off funding for the ISS, the James Web Telescope and further research on Tang - we don't have the money."

Guido from NASA: "That's a nice city you have there. Shame for something to happen to it. You know, those reentry calculations are really quite difficult and it's easy to mess up the numbers. Better if we had enough money to ensure that sort of thing could never, ever happen."

You mean billionaire's toys. There is no short-term profit to be had in space. The private 'Space Industry' will be deader than Nasa in under 10 years.

Perhaps we should just run with that and see what happens (not that we have much of a choice). During the past 10 years, NASA hasn't done much for the manned space program (unmanned is a different story). And rather recently we have seen this weird development of isolated billionaire nerds. Maybe that's what we need. Don't forget, the Chinese are creating a similar class of uber wealthy individuals as are the Indians. A couple of these people [virtual-history.com] locked in a competition for the first Space Lord could be ve

In the short term it may just be a toy for the wealthy but there are profits to be made in space in the long term. The world's appetite for resources such as iron is increasing and there is a limited supply [wikipedia.org] of it on this rock.

Well, generally when I start bitching that my car is too old, I replace it. I don't get rid of the car and then sit around at home for at least 5 years figuring out what my next car will be. It'd be nice if our elected officials had the same foresight with NASA as we all do with our cars.

I don't have a problem with turning over space transportation to private companies, but I do think it would be really nice if those private companies were ready to transport before we turned it over to them.

I seriously doubt I would even for a instant consider hitchhiking to work for three years if a new car was going to cost me $160 (~0.25% of GDP). Shit, for that, I could justify buying a minibike to play around with that I only use on nice weekends in the summer.

Instead, I'm using 90% of my salary to pay off my credit card interest, pay for health insurance (not actual health care...) and buy M80's to blow up the n

sorry, I was just running with shadowfaxcrx 's analogy.You're right, the situation is more like my putting out a request for bids for a custom car with a lifetime support contract for $162 / year, that seems like an even sweeter deal. Anyhow, I'm not sure how informative it is to model a country's budget as an individual's expenses, but it is amusing. Does make Unka Sam look sort of like a irrational psychopath though.

The same thing that happen when you privatize anything. Corporations overcharge, provide shitty service, and generally use their influence to manipulate the government.

Commercial aviation proves otherwise. You may wish to quibble over service but in constant dollars airfare has come down quite a bit in price over the decades so its not unreasonable that cuts were made in other areas, or that some costs are externalized from air fare. Are there occasional screw ups, absolutely, but I don't think I'd characterize overall service poorly. I've found airline employees as helpful as they can be most of the time.

Commercial space flight has no vision beyond sending tourists to LEO and throwing more satellites into higher orbits. It's never going to move beyond that on its own because the economics don't work for entities incapable of thinking that long term. Every possible monetary benefit from leaving earth orbit is so far away that no commercial entity will take it on. This is why the government needs to remain heavily involved in space exploration: if it doesn't, no one else (other than foreign governments) will.

Retiring the shuttle program is good in some ways because it frees up resources to go for more ambitious goals like Mars and beyond. It's bad, though, in that it takes away NASA's primary method of staying in the public eye. People get excited about humans going into space. Most people don't get excited about sending robots into space. This sort of thing is important to an organization whose funding is subject to the changing political winds.

The projects NASA has in the works sound really exciting, but with cutting cost being the name of the game in Washington these days, NASA needs all the public support it can get to keep all of its plans from dying on the vine as its budget gets eviscerated. Removing the one thing that got it on TV on a regular basis isn't a good thing in these circumstances.

"Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise" -- Wernher von Braun

NASA could really do with a man like him again. Not that he was a saint, far from it as anyone who was on the receiving end of a V-2 would surely tell you, but he had the essential characteristics that made him hugely successful in selling space. He was an scientist who understood what must be done, a visionary who saw the need to do it, and a media savvy and inspiring person who could sell the package to government and the public.

Of course his efforts were also helped immensely by the Soviet decision to give us someone to race with. Everything always seems just a bit more important when your rival is trying to beat you at it.

Commercial space flight has no vision beyond sending tourists to LEO and throwing more satellites into higher orbits.

I know a few people involved in commercial space flight. Their vision extends beyond that. They are the same sort of dreamers that in the 1950s and 60s would have worked for NASA. Don't be misled by the first practical baby steps that they are attempting.

In general I agree that gov't needs to be involved in some of the more leading edge and purely scientific missions. However that is not quite what the shuttle was doing, it was generally doing those mundane things you mentioned regard commercial enterpri

If that's not vision, I don't know what the hell definition of vision you are using. I've personally toured the facilities of SpaceX, ULA, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Gruman, and JPL. I can tell you right now, the energy, enthusiasm, and drive at SpaceX is in a class of its own. That company, and its founder, has more vision for the space industry than the sum total of the other agencies I have listed combined.

Mark my words as an aerospace engineer: SpaceX is the future of successful United States space business, and they have the gumption and drive to pull off the stuff folks have been declaring to be impossible for about twenty years now. Just like Google lit a fire under the ass of stale computer companies like Microsoft and Apple, SpaceX is going to be the spark that fans a whole new flame and era of space exploration for the United States.

And I've almost finished my 6h recording of NasaTV for this historical day for a total of 2.9GBytes. I wasn't alive to witness the first launch of the space shuttle, but I was alive to catch and save this one.
I would also like to thank Apple for it's HTTP Live Streaming protocol. It takes only a few lines of Bash to dump the the complete 3Mbps MPEG Transport Stream (H.264+AVC) to the hard-drive. I want to be able to watch this again.

I was, and it was wonderful. There was a time when every launch of the shuttle was an event worth noting, and those of us who were interested would gather around the radio or TV to witness the event. That stopped when shuttle launches became commonplace. That was cool, because, well, launching a ship into space should be commonplace. Sadly, this meant noone cared any longer, because shuttle launches were unremarkable and uninteresting. Now no-one cares about space any longer, and the shuttle program is

I was referring to the US Space Exploration budget. The United States DoD budget, farm subsidies, alternative energies budget and a handful of other massive sources of inefficent spending is a discussion for another day and another news article

Oh, you poor thing... One can only dream. I do applaud your child-like innocence. Who knows, sometimes south dreams might come true.
Four of the hundreds of kids that 40 years ago dreamed to be astronauts, are now in orbit, so maybe, just maybe, your dream can come to life.
</sarcasm>
I'm sure that NASA would have decent funding if it wasn't for the Middle-East conflicts.

Because of stupid NASA planning, true. But only partly. NASA contractors overinflated project costs whenever possible to build their stake. And congress couldn't keep their stinking fingers out of the pie, constantly micro-managing NASA spending. It was, and still is, a mess. I watched it for 15 years at JSC in Houston before I could no longer stand it.

Challenger happened mainly because of the Congress because they wanted to build the solid rocket boosters in a far far away state. Then the only was was to ship them by barge. To be able to do that, they had to be in segments. And hence they needed O-rings.It's all about poli-ticks.

To be fair, I don't believe anyone has built a one-piece solid rocket the size of the shuttle SRBs and there are some significant technical issues with large solid rockets. The usual failure mode seems to be a massive explosion rather than a leak.

Challenger happened mainly because of the Congress because they wanted to build the solid rocket boosters in a far far away state. Then the only was was to ship them by barge. To be able to do that, they had to be in segments. And hence they needed O-rings.It's all about poli-ticks.

To be fair, I don't believe anyone has built a one-piece solid rocket the size of the shuttle SRBs and there are some significant technical issues with large solid rockets. The usual failure mode seems to be a massive explosion rather than a leak.

Wrong, and how!

The #1 & #2, largest single rocket motors ever fired were monolithic SRBs. Look up the Aerjoet AJ-260 program from the early sixties. (sorry, Astronautix is offline right now) NASA dropped the idea once they had the kinks adequately worked out of the liquid fueled engines.

Their competitor in the program never managed a successful firing, blowing up their prototype, and then went on to lobby congress for the contract for the only certified astronaut-killing SRBs in the world. niii

Your comment resonates with what Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the post-Apollo preface to Prelude to Space:

Yet when, in 1947, I set this novel exactly thirty years in the future, I did not really believe that a lunar landing would be achieved even by that distant date [...] Still less could I have imagined that the first nation to reach the Moon would so swiftly abandon it again....

In one sense, the Apollo Project was indeed a Prelude to Space. Now there will be a short interlude; and sometime in the 1980s,

Flamebait? Hardly. It's dead on. US space policy has been a mess since the day after Apollo 11. Before then, we had a clear mission. That mission was to land on the moon, and do it before the Soviets. We accomplished that mission. The next mission was to establish a space station, a moon base, and a cheaper way to get to them both. The shuttle could have been significantly cheaper but contractors, congress, and NASA itself got in the way. (Reusable SRBs? Really? How much did we "save" reusing the

America is quickly becoming what used to be known as a third world nation. Our space program is now below the Russians and Chinese in terms of capability. We are selling our roads, power plants, ports and other basic infrastructure. So it goes.

Oh really? The Russians have Soyuz - a 1960's design launched on upgraded 1970's military boosters. Not to denigrate them - they've done an impressive yeoman's job of tossing stuff up in the air and getting it back. They are the number 2 contributor to the ISS. But they have done little else (in the manned spacecraft sector). The Chinese have, wait for it, a copy of the Soyuz and some Grand Ambitions (these are pretty inexpensive, I can sell you a couple at a big discount if you are interested).

Make no mistake, space travel ain't easy. Yes, those accidents were horrible. But over the course of thirty years, they put the Hubble telescope into orbit, repaired said telescope, built the international space station, launched three probes and carried many people and satellites into orbit. All of these tasks increased our understanding of the world and worlds around us, and has shown that countries can cooperate in space. These efforts were expensive and dangerous; yes, there were accidents and yes,

Nothing done by the shuttle program was particularly revolutionary. The United States had a well established and mature space program by the time the first shuttle entered orbit. Yet two out of the five reusable launch vehicles were destroyed over the course of their lifetime, for a failure rate of 40%. The Apollo program had a similar failure rate, but it at least landed several people on the Moon. I'm not saying the shuttle program didn't improve mankind, but those improvements were merely incremental

I'm hoping NASA stops developing "day to day" vehicles and starts working on next generation technologies. They can do the research while the private industry takes the existing, proven, technology and keeps man flying into orbit. I invision NASA as the R&D arm of the space sector. They can make new and interesting satelites, plan new missions out past orbit, plan habitation on other planets, and plan straight up new tech.

It strikes me that some 50+ years later NASA should be beyond LEO vehicles. If at this point NASA were to develop any sort of LEO capability, it should be a rapid-response rescue vehicle to go to the aid of commercial spacecraft - kind of like the Coast Guard.

Other than that, I'd like to see NASA starting on true space flight - vehicles assembled in orbit that are never meant to get any closer to the Earth. (I was starting to thing that the rescue vehicle mentioned should be space-only until I

1. We need an agency to to scientific research and develop new technologies. It was a mistake for NASA to get ensnarled in running daily operations of getting payloads into orbit. 2. Congress should just provide the goal and the budget, not specify the means of accomplishing the goal. (no gerrymandering the pork across districts to buy votes) This should go for the military, too.3. The shuttle program is a camel and a fiscal failure. But it was what we had.

What NASA really needs to do is put time, money and man power on this [physorg.com] type of a spacecraft.

A reusable, multi-mission space craft that is basically a space station that goes from one gravity well to another. It should have life support, exercise facilities and plenty of space for people to live in for up to a year or more. You want to go to mars? send up a lander and ascent vehicle on small launchers, attach to the Nautilus. Then send up astronauts on another small vehicle. Go to mars, do your mission

Apparently the computer couldn't tell if the LOX tank vent arm had properly retracted (probably a bad switch or something like that), and stopped the count. They quickly swung a camera into place to verify that it was fully retracted, then resumed the count.

SpaceX should have it's Dragon module with a crew within 3 years hopefully. They've already fired the thing in to space and retrieved it. It's just a matter of finishing off the crew support and contingency systems.

Ha! Spoken like someone who has never tried to successfuly stabilize a chaotic system with over ten-thousand input variables to the dynamics model equations. Sorry geekoid, but anyone who honestly believes launching a rocket into space, a vehicle that is, quite literally, the size of a skyscraper which expends the energy of a large military warhead in a semi-controlled manner in under 5 minutes "isn't really hard," has officially lost all credibility on the topic of launch vehicles.

It makes it harder to let go without a new, better, faster, inspiring vehicle to latch on to.

Then join me in latching on to the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule [spacex.com]. They are the next big thing in human spaceflight, and probably the only new manned craft that will come online by the end of the decade. Yes, it is only designed for LEO, but with a ferry that cheap we'll be able to afford something bigger to go farther out.

The very first, Columbia, when I was a child at a friend's house.The very last, today's launch.

All the others I've only seen after the fact. I did watch a re-entry live in person once from a Cessna 172 at about 11,000 feet over the north of Houston at night. It left a plasma trail across the sky from horizon to horizon. It was funny to think when we got back to Houston Gulf airport (formerly called Spaceland, hence its identifier KSPX, sadly now demolished and covered in identikit McMansions) only 40 or so miles away, the shuttle crew had already landed in Florida, disembarked, and were probably halfway though their first cup of coffee.

When Columbia launched, according to my mother, I watched 8 hours of the broadcast. All the way from the astronauts' breakfast to the press conference past the launch. I didn't move.

I guess even at that age we humans are capable of grasping the awesome and extraordinary quality of certain events.

I don't know why I'm posting, except perhaps that through my whole life I have felt a deep attachment to space exploration, science and technological achievement (all of which I've always considered to coincide with humanitarianism, if not cause). The space shuttle has been the icon, the embodiment of that attachment and love.

Lief Ericson made it to america first, but managed to stay only for a short while. It would be 500 more years before explorers returned from Europe (and not in the best form, it should be said).

I know we from Earth will return, and I hope and believe it will not be 500 more years.

I remember vividly the day we received the news in our elementary school via public address that the Challenger launch had a terrible ending. But there's been so much good stuff besides the relatively few (but so terrible) tragedies.

I decided to watch today's launch here at work. A co-worker slid over and asked, "Where are they going? The moon?" No joke. Made me kind of depressed that some people are so completely and blissfully ignorant of our space program.

Just out of curiosity, is NASA hanging onto any of the shuttles just in case? Back when DIRECT [launchcomplexmodels.com] was promoting an STS-based heavy launcher, they mentioned that there were enough fuel tanks and SRBs to do quite a number of flights - more than the shuttle has done. Could they just park the thing in a hangar somewhere and dust it off if the need arose?

Well, Atlantis's last mission was over a year ago. Surely these machines don't need a year of maintenance between launches. Looking at the flight manifest, the shortest turnaround was just under two months, and the longest was a month shy of four years. I may be wrong, but I suspect that most of that time was spent sitting in a hangar with a proverbial sheet over it.

About 10 years ago I was at the VAB when all 4 orbiters were at KSC. There are only 3 bays in the Orbiter Processing Facility, and at the time the fourth shuttle was usually in Palmdale on a maintenance rotation. On the rare occasion where all four were at KSC, one had to be left in a corner somewhere waiting for it's turn in an OPF bay.

So, as I walked into the VAB (which is essentially a 50 story open bay, with a lot of open space) off on the left is Discovery, engines out, parked in the corner with a hug

Just out of curiosity, is NASA hanging onto any of the shuttles just in case?

And what exactly do they expect to do when Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones need to get into orbit to save the earth from a disabled soviet nuclear satellite? They'd better leave a battery charger on at least one of those things or we're in big trouble.

Well America, it's up to India, China and Russia now. Leave the whole "space" and "discovery" and "dreams for the future" business to the up-and-comers. They'll take over the space exploration for you so you don't need to send people up or build space telescopes anymore. You've got more pressing, practical things to worry about! Terrorism, wars, economic stuff, that sort of thing. Good run guys!

I have to wonder... If North Korea suddenly announced that they had A) manned launch capability and B) plans to do a moon run in ten years, would America still decide that manned space travel was done and over with?

I watched the STS-135 launch with my teenaged daughter a few minutes ago. I was only a few years older than she when I watched the STS-1 launch with a couple of my friends who stayed over my house for the even. We still had the Apollo era habit of watching all the televised launches.

It really did feel like a new beginning, the dawn of the era of (mostly) reusable spacecraft, just like in science fiction. The Shuttle may have turned out to be an abortive step toward the future, but it also accomplished a g

It was time to end it. Over 30 years the shuttle has done some great things, but NASA has failed to fix what was broken with the STS and failed to upgrade it properly. Privatization is the best thing we can do for space; government involvement has gotten to big, bloated, and stupid for real innovation.

"Privatization is the best thing we can do for space; government involvement has gotten to big, bloated, and stupid for real innovation."

Is this some kind of religious mantra with people? Privatization might be fine for launching communications satellites, but other than that, any possible business model surely relies on government contracts. Sort of like it is now. Where is the profit motive in going to the Moon or Mars or anywhere else outside of LEO? There isn't one.

I'd take it more as the white room crew making a patriotic statement than a religious reference. In many of the employees, there is a pretty significant sense of national service, both on the part of the government and contractor employees. I would say the majority of employees (at least the ones I worked with, who were mainly engineers) were primarily motivated by things other than a paycheck, which in most cases was smaller than a similar private sector position.

Why do you say a blatant politically motivated lie "fits well"? Khrushchev made that up as part of his campaign to enforce state atheism; Gagarin and his family were Russian Orthodox. Many of the people involved in space exploration have been deeply religious; many have felt that their experience has deepened their appreciation for God's creation and that their relation to the Creator was a driving force in their quest for scientific discovery.

space program has not only always been wrapped up in this "sentimental nonsense" - it would never have been possible without it.

No space program without religion? The religious may not like it, but intellectual progress and morality does not require god. Because some who worked on the space program claimed to believe in a magical being does not mean the space program is not possible without magical beings.

It takes more faith to believe that God doesn't exist than it does to believe it. In the end you die and either nothing happens or you go to hell. The aftermath is irreversible

Uh, no. The Invisible Pink Unicorn sends all atheists to Invisible Pink Unicorn Heaven where they get free ponies and cake, while those who believe in some kind of god are sent to their religion's version of Hell.

Pascal's Wager was a silly idea when he first proposed it, I'm amazed that anyone would still try to use it centuries later.

There's a serious problem with Pascal's Wager (which you are positing the essentials of here). It assumes that you're worshiping the right God(s). The problem is not binary. There are a vast and continuously morphing number of sects, religions, cults, and belief systems; very many of which assume that if you don't believe what they do you will go to something more or less like Hell. It's not enough, according to most major and a many minor religions, to believe in God(s) you have to believe in the right

That's mostly because the annoying, intolerant atheists are obviously the only ones you hear. I'm an atheist, and I'm fine with people praying, thanking their God/gods, and other public demonstrations of their faith. Everybody has the right to decide their own beliefs, and to talk about their own beliefs. I think they're wrong, they think I'm wrong, and that's OK. As long as we don't force beliefs on each other, we can get along.

A lot of atheists are decent people that you probably don't even realiz

The fundamental problem with the space shuttle concept is that mass in orbit is worth more than its weight in gold, so it is pointless to bring that mass back to Earth in the form of a space shuttle. A minimal return capsule like with Apollo for crew makes more sense. Even now, the best place for the shuttles to be kept is probably in space, docked to the space station, where they could be used as living space or raw materials for future projects. The whole idea was stupid energetically. Also, as anyone who